So I'm planning on "recycling" an old dell machine which we replaced. It has 512mb of ram and a 2ghz single core processor or thereabouts.

I will be partitioning the hard drive and having a windows xp build on the one partition (this I will use for testing using Internet Explorer 6 and 7) and a currently unknown linux build on the other.

This linux build will be used for me to do web development. I will want to be able to SSH in to the machine when it is running (through putty or something similar) on my Windows desktop (different machine) to copy stuff around.

Most importantly I will need the filesystem to be networked shared with my Windows installation. I'm not sure if this restricts me to using a particular filesystem (at the moment I am using Windows XP and Windows 7 at home)

Anyone got advice about what Linux build to use? And filesystems in particular!

I'll be running the latest stable versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL...

The only thing this will be used for is web development so this should be an easy one for those of you that know about Linux

Slightly leftfield, but I can highly recommend the free VMWare ESXi 3.5 which allows you to partition your machine into VM's and run them concurrently which would allow you to test (using your XP partition) at the same time as developing.

I've currently carved up a box at work and stuck Ubuntu on it, based on people's recommendations. My thoughts are Ubuntu installs nice and easily and everything was recognised and setup correctly. As far as sshd goes, it's standard on pretty much every Linux distribution and I've never had to install it specifically to be able to putty in over ssh.

For filesystems, you have a few options. You could setup an NFS mount on the Windows partition or a Samba mount on the Linux partition and then you can read and write directly to them over the network. More info here. Or, if you only want to share between the two partitions on that machine, then you can mount the NTFS Windows partition using something like Feisty on Ubuntu and edit files directly via Linux.

Chris

If you run VMware etc then I'd say put 2GB of Ram into the machine as it will need the extra one ot allow the VM's to have 512MB each.

Have you thought about this?

Blackdot.be :: Run Apache HTTPD From USB

Can be very useful for testing!

Or just follow these instructions and you will have something up and running in no time

The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.2 x86_64 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

I have done exactly the same as your an recycled an old PC into my media/dev server at home, i believe that its a P4 3.0Ghz, with 1Gb of RAM and its massively over powered for what it does, before that i used a PIII 600Mhz and i have noticed no difference whatsoever!

Edited 21 January, 200917 yr by apinner